Saturday, 9 May 2015

Trees For The Homeless?

Manchester's
St. Peter's Square, on one side of which stand the magnificent edifices of the Central
Library and Town Hall Extension, has just seen the first show of blossom on the
newly planted trees which are part of its recent refurbishment. The flowers are
inverted mauve trumpets, so pretty and so unusual as to elicit much admiration
from those who have noticed them. Not, however, from the homeless protester I
spoke to whose tent is one of the many pitched underneath them.

He and I discussed
- briefly - not the causes of homelessness nor the remedies, but the council's
failure to provide shelter despite its legal duty to do so. We then had an
inconclusive argument about whether budget cuts imposed on the council by
central government were to blame and whether the council should divert capital
expenditure to meet operational shortfalls. "At the end of the day, we
don't need trees: we need houses," said the protester. He had a point, of
course, but not really a solution. Tomorrow is polling day and he urged me to
vote the incumbents out of the council chamber. Even if I could, would it resolve
the question of how best to allocate resources?

By way of
contrast, I've just been to visit my relatives in rural Lincolnshire, a place where
tented encampments of homeless people are not in evidence and the blossoming
trees are remarked upon less than the bumper crop of asparagus that has just
come into season. My brother-in-law, David, drove us just beyond the village (I
know, it's so unsustainable) to a local farm entrance where asparagus bunches
at £1 each were left on a table next to an honesty box. I scooped them up, a
bargain if you don't factor in the cost of fetching them. The village was
recently in the news when a resident - a friend of David's and a fellow Boston
United fan - won £54 million on the Euromillions Lottery and bought himself a
top-of-the-range Range Rover. As we passed the home of the winner's daughter, David
pointed out that there were now two such Range Rovers parked outside her modest
bungalow and that his friend had not even bought him a cup of tea at last
Saturday's match.

In the
course of this short journey we also passed within yards of the RAF base where
our Eurofighter jets are stationed. They look like machines dreamt up for a
Star Wars sequel and they fly as if they were in one. We watched two of them
take off and, within seconds, they were on a vertical ascent. Awesome and
terrifying are the only adjectives I can find to describe the spectacle. Of
course, Eurofighters are expensive to buy - even the local Euromillionaire, if
he were to resist buying another Range Rover, would be about £12 million short
- but they are worth it, according to the Ministry of Defence. I watched the
planes scream through the skies and thought about the cost of maintaining such
squadrons against the cost of a few hostels for the homeless.

We drove
home and, shortly afterwards, were sipping tea in the conservatory when a WWII
Lancaster bomber flew directly over us at about 300 feet. I'm told it is one of
only two still operational and that it is practising for a forthcoming ceremony
to mark the 70th anniversary of VE Day. Compared with the Eurofighters it looks
and sounds like a lumbering relic of a bygone age, but I guess that in its day,
it too was awesome and terrifying, especially if it was coming at you with a
belly full of bombs. It was also expensive but, under the circumstances, the
cost would have been easy to justify.